(Kitco News) - Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have been able to witness firsthand how gold is created in our universe.
A scientific paper published last week in Nature documented a collision between two ultradense neutron stars nearly a year ago. The paper noted that the explosion, referred to as a kilonova, was the biggest ever observed. The event duration was also unprecedented, lasting 200 seconds. Most of these types of explosions last two seconds or less.
Along with measuring the gamma radiation bursts (GRB) the scientists were able to use the James Webb and Hubble telescopes to observe a flash of light emanating from the same event.
“It was thrilling to study a kilonova as we had never seen before using the powerful eyes of Hubble and JWST," research team member and University of Rome astrophysicist Eleonora Troja told Space.com in an interview. "This is the first time we've been able to verify that metals heavier than iron and silver were freshly made in front of us.
According to some reports before this discovery, it was believed that long GRBs resulted from the collapse of massive stars, not from the merger of neutron stars. Scientists have noted that most common stellar exposures release enough energy to create iron, which has an atomic mass of 57 amu. However, it takes a massive amount of energy to create gold, which has an atomic weight of nearly 197 amu.
Neutron stars are the densest things in the universe except for black holes. They are born when heavy stars die and their cores collapse, but they don’t have enough mass to become a blackhole.
